Literally Digital

I’ve just been given a share of the “keys” to the Mancunian Way blog. If you like, a third way between Sarah and Paul. Mainly – but not entirely – I’ll be talking about the amazing variety of ways that the creative and arts sectors in Manchester are being changed by digital technologies.
With Manchester Literature Festival on the horizon, I wanted to highlight a few of the ways in which the city’s literary community has been using the web. It’s perhaps no surprise that writers like the web, after all it’s primarily a written medium. Yet as a recent provocation by Andrew Gallix made clear, e-literature – or literature written specifically for the web, hasn’t really taken off. Whether or not we’ve succumbed to the allure of the Sony Reader or the Kindle, two new and desirable portable reading devices, the book remains special: cheap, portable, and cherishable.
So, I find the web is more than ever a place to find out what’s going on in Manchester’s literary scene. A good place to start is Literature Northwest, where a wide range of literary events – whether workshops or readings – is constantly updated. And, so easy is it to set up a blog, that every new night now finds its audience far quicker than in the past, through it’s own website or through connecting people via Facebook. The latter now tends to suggest other people I might know – and the ones it gets right are inevitably other writers.
With a new term starting there are perhaps a hundred students about to start creative writing courses at the city’s 3 universities, and most of them, at one time or other, you’ll find with their laptop or their Moleskine in the Art of Tea, Sand Bar, Trof or the Cornerhouse. Away from their garrett, the Web 2.0 writer might also find time to browse the online pages of Manchester based publishers and magazines such as Transmission, Comma, ifpthenq and Carcanet. Having missed last week’s intriguing new night at the Deaf Institute, because I was out of the city, I’m looking forward to this Wednesday’s The Other Room.